Customising a Navigation List

I like the “Vertical Images List” in Apex, which allows me to create a navigation bar of icons to give users quick access to various pages in my site. It’s easy to customise each item – you can select any image, add attributes for the image if necessary, and each item in the list has a URL which can point to another page in the application, or to an arbitrary URL.

My problem, however, was that some of the URLs in my list took the user to another site, or opened a PDF, and these would open in the same window. I wanted these particular items to open a new window, but the navigation item properties don’t allow this.

To solve this, I modified the Vertical Images List template, and used one of the User Defined Attributes to add “target=_blank” to the items that I wanted. While I was in there, I made a few tweaks to customise the template further to my liking.

A. Modify the Vertical Images List template.

Go to Shared Components and open the Templates (under User Interface).

Scroll down to Vertical Images List (in the Lists category) and open it for editing.

Modify the Template Definition(WARNING: the code for different Apex templates may differ slightly; you’ll have to use a bit of nouse to customise it to your requirements) – you can add bits like #A01#, #A02#, etc – in my case I’ve used the following convention: